Networks can suffer from faults which cause actual service outages, e.g., the loss of the ability to communicate data to/from a customer premise. Service outages often result in a customer reporting of service outage and/or complaint. Ideally it is desirable to detect network faults and/or poorly operating network nodes before a service outage occurs so that the network can be serviced and an outage avoided.
In order to detect faults and/or network conditions which may lead to network outages a wide variety of conditions and information are often monitored and/or gathered. Among the information which may be gathered and/or monitored include work orders issued to repair network faults and/or in response to customer complaints, communications errors detected in the network, signal levels and/or various signal alarms used to alert system maintenance personal of actual or potential problems.
While various metrics relating to actual network faults and/or errors are important, network faults and errors occur on a regular basis as part of normal operation and may not significantly degrade service to customers in many cases. Thus, while information about network faults, errors, signal conditions, etc. are useful it is easy of for maintenance personnel such as, for example, repair technicians to be overwhelmed with the large amount and types of different data about network health and conditions such that it is often difficult to prioritize the allocation of limited resources to the repair and/or maintenance of network nodes and their associated equipment, e.g., signal amplifiers, etc.
Communications networks often include multiple nodes located in different physical locations. To serve a node a technician must often visit the site of the node and/or physical equipment associated with the node that can impact communication service between the node and customer premises which are connected to the network through a particular node. This often involves sending a service truck out to the location of the network node to be serviced.
Thus, the problem of efficient resource allocation for network service is complicated by the geographic distribution of network nodes and the availability of maintenance staff and or equipment, e.g., service trucks, available in a geographic region.
From the above discussion it should be appreciated that there is a need for methods and apparatus which can take into consideration a wide variety of different sources of network node and/or condition information and rank nodes according to their overall health, e.g., ability to reliably provide communications services to customers.
In particular there is a need for methods and/or apparatus for automatically generating overall node health scores, ranking network nodes according to their health, and/or taking actions based on generated overall node health scores such as notifying maintenance personnel of such scores and/or deploying or taking of service actions based on generated overall node health scores.
It is desirable that the methods and/or apparatus be capable of taking into consideration actual detected errors. However, it is also desirable that in at least some embodiments information which does not indicate a definitive error or fault but can bring node reliability into question or be indicative of a potential future fault, also be taken into consideration when generating an overall node health score.